“In my previous career I was a Fashion Designer. I’d always been interested in the stories that fashion/costumes can tell and the way our bodies move. I went to graduate school at Parsons in Design & Technology in the early naughts, hoping to expand upon my fashion career by learning how to design, build and embed electronics into clothing. The department was chaired by Colleen Macklin, the program was directed by Katie Salen, and Nick Fortugno taught Game Design. Learning Game Design on top of everything else changed my life. A few years later in 2010, my life changed again when I became a Fellow at Eyebeam which is a media art non-profit/hackerspace that supports artists. There, I was able to grow my practice as a Media Artist/Game Designer, learn the value of community engagement, sharing knowledge and what it means to be a Teaching Artist. Many things have happened since then, but those are the basic foundations for which I am incredibly grateful for.”

“My inspirations are often just things happening around me. Maybe it’s a trend that seems silly to me or maybe something I saw recently or a question I might have lingering in my mind. I think about the player’s experience most of all — what emotional journey they will have, and what they will take away from the experience. Since most of my games are multiplayer, I think about what kinds of relationships between the players. And then I build the game, the technology and the whole experience around the concept. I try to playtest a lot.”

“I hope I am understanding your question correctly, but is it about hacking pre existing technology? If so, I think that it gets harder and harder to hack electronics as it gets smaller and more advanced. However, there are always fun tools out there like the Raspberry Pi Zero W that are so small and powerful that they can be embedded directly into the controllers. With older technology, I think radio is so cool — like stand alone AM/FM radios, shortwave, walkie talkies or marine clocks. I am not sure what I want to make with them, but I think about them a lot for some reason.”

“My first gaming love was EverQuest because of all the social potential. I loved the prospect of being able to play in a fantasy world with people from around the globe! I had the most fun playing on the team-based PvP server because of how it scratched my competitive itch. This opened the door to competitive gaming when friends I made through EverQuest introduced me to other competitive games like Tribes, Quake, and Counter-Strike, and Halo.

I was almost always the only girl in the groups I played with. I knew a few others from my MMO guilds, but I didn’t know any others who played shooters. In 2004 I leaned heavily on my experience with MMO guild leadership to get a job working as a Community Manager for Ubisoft. When I started playing Ghost Recon online on the PS2 to get more familiar with that community, I found that I couldn’t get through a match without someone exclaiming their surprise that a girl was playing, too.

When I brought these stories back to colleagues at Ubisoft, we came up with the idea of putting together a team of women all-stars to make a competitive team. As Captain of the Frag Dolls team I got to meet hundreds of other girls and women who loved playing games competitively even before they were known as esports, and I became all too familiar with the cultural barriers that were preventing more women from playing at an elite competitive level.”

My college experience involved a lot of gaming and a lot of studying anthropological theory. I majored in anthropology as an undergraduate and, as a senior, taught a student-run class called “Anthropology of Online Gaming Communities” while recruiting my students for my MMO guild. Gaming and anthropology became inextricably intertwined and provided frameworks for how I thought of each.

I always imagined that I’d go back to school, and it was my experience with esports and the game industry that made me want to continue studying games and their communities as products of cultural practice. I wanted to help build a better understanding of the relationships between players, developers, and their technologies of play, and how they all shape and perpetuate one another.”

“The work I do with AnyKey supports inclusion and equity through research about the challenges and barriers faced by underrepresented groups. We use our research findings and shared love of games to create strategic programs that show folks from both industry and community what more inclusive and empathetic gaming looks like.

Over the past 6 years we have rolled out programs that teach best practices for inclusion and provide people with new frameworks for understanding what marginalized players experience. Some of the most common exclusionary practices in gaming spaces persist because players repeat something they heard someone else say or do, without understanding how what they’re doing is causing harm. For those folks, gentle feedback and redirecting with a more positive model for how to play with others can make a difference that adds up in daily practice.

One of the best examples of this work is the GLHF Pledge that we created as a simple set of guidelines for how to be a good sport in online gaming spaces. It contains 7 promises about remembering respect, compassion, integrity, and courage, even in the heat of competition. Over 1.5 million players have taken this pledge and many of those proudly wear our GLHF badge online to show that they’ve committed to being a better kind of competitor and digital citizen.

The thing that keeps me excited about doing this advocacy work is that I get to help people develop their capacities for awareness, reflection, and empathy while in their own gaming communities. I’ve always loved games for their special power to bring people together, and I’m grateful every time I can help people feel more welcome in a community that plays together.”